Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

President Lyndon Johnson is thought to have said, after hearing of a critical Walter Cronkite commentary about the Vietnam War, words to this effect: "If I have lost Walter Cronkite, I have lost middle America." The precise wording differs depending on from whom you heard the story. And although Cronkite held great importance in his day, more so than any one individual CAN possess in the multipolar media world of today, the story is likely apocryphal. Still, I think as a rapt reader of Caro's books, that Johnson may have had the self-awareness necessary to have said something like that. Trump would never say, "If I have lost Ann Coulter, I have lost my hypernationalist base." Maybe he should, though. https://www.thewrap.com/ann-coulter-turns-on-disloyal-actual-retard-trump-in-twitter-rant/ I have no dog in that fight. May Coulter and Trump tear each other to pieces until neither is heard from any more. Just get me some popcorn.

Robert Caro, the famous biographer (of Robert Moses, and more recently, continuingly, of Lyndon Johnson) recently published a memory of his own, about his early days in journalism, fresh out of college. I'll paraphrase his article, with some direct quotes along the way. Caro went to work for Newsday on Long Island, in 1959. The managing editor was Alan Hathway, an old-school fellow who didn't like the Ivy League. Caro, a Princetonian, had been hired despite Hathway not by him. At that time, Newsday didn't have any Sunday issue. Which meant there was almost nobody in the office on Saturday, since such offices are always working on the next day's paper. What if something important happened on a Saturday? The low man on the office hierarchy would be there, would take the call and put the information in a memo, those higher up on the totem pole could act on it Sunday. Aa the '50s ended and the '60s revved up, the future of Mitchel Field (an air force bas...

Over at Yahoo!Answers, I fielded the following question, "How did the Cuban Missile Crisis fit into the Cold War? How does it help one to understand the cold war?" My answer:  "The Kennedy administration found it necessary to make a concession but impossible to be SEEN making a concession. They publicly claimed they wouldn't offer any tit-for-tat regarding withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba, but privately through a back channel they DID offer a tit-for-tat in connection with missiles in Turkey. And that was accepted." Added. They had to keep this back channel a secret so they could get headlines that said things like  "Reds Back Down on Cuba."  Returning to my yahoo answer.... "Robert Caro has a good account of this in his latest volume of his biography of LBJ, who was of course VP at the time. "How it helps one understand the cold war is that it offers an example of a dangerous combination of power politics and juveni...

An issue quite analogous to depreciation is depletion. For businesses that operate by extracting resources from the ground, surely one of their most important assets is the expected amount of oil, coal, diamonds, or whatever-it-might be that is still down there, yet to be extracted, on the land owned or leased by the company for this purpose. Over time, as oil [let us say] is removed, necessarily the remaining oil under there is depleted. The issue has often been politically contentious. Indeed, references to the oil depletion allowance in various stages of its development run like a Wagnerian motif through the various volumes of Robert Caro’s work on the life and times of Lyndon Johnson, who as both Representative and Senator from the oil-rich state of Texas was a stalwart defender of a very generous allowance for the tax accounting books, one which does not have to be duplicated in the financial accounting books. But let’s stick to the latter.   One way in which account...

The Federal Lawyer this month ran my review of the fourth volume in Robert Caro's ongoing biography of Lyndon Johnson, the 36th president of the United States. I discuss aspects of the volume not discussed much in the other reviews I've seen, including Johnson's dealings with Bobby Baker and ( through Bobby Baker) with insurance salesman Don Reynolds. Here is a quote from the book (I don't quote it, though I allude to it, in my review): Reynolds told Williams that in 1957, having been advised that a 'political connection' would be helpful in building up his insurance business, he contacted Bobby Baker, a fellow South Carolinian, and they entered into an agreement under which he would make payments to Baker 'because,' as Reynolds was to put it, 'of his social contacts and his wide knowledge of people [whom he] could present to me.' Baker had shortly thereafter introduced him to Walter Jenkins. Johnson, that same year, had mentioned to Bak...

In a forthcoming review on Caro's new book -- the fourth volume of THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON -- I summarize some of what Caro has to say about Bobby Baker. The Baker anchor was an important aspect of the Johnson VP and early Presidential years, at least as Caro is reconstructing them, and some of Caro's other reviewers seem to have said nothing or far too little about it. That review should appear in the next issue of The Federal Lawyer. Meanwhile, I've discovered that I wrote something about Caro once before. I'm the author of a book on the political history of the US Supreme Court, from the New Deal era to the George H.W. Bush presidency. In that context I mentioned Baker. It introduced my book's first invocation of the concept of executive privilege. I'll just quote that passage here: Early in 1964 the Senate opened a formal inquiry into allegations of influence peddling brought against Bobby Baker, Johnson's longtime friend and former aid...